lemming

I just finished lights around a constant combinator that serves as a switch for recovery of power in case of a brownout on Vulcanus. The lights are circling around the combinator while changing colours through the whole spectrum.

It's completely useless and I love it and am very proud about it. I spent 2 evenings on it :-)

Would you mind defining what an annihilation is? What I read (which isn't much, admittedly) sounded like it's just a particle and antiparticle interacting in a way that makes them disappear and other particles appear, while conserving a momentum and charge of the whole overall interaction. How is it fundamentally different from, let's say, two high-energy photons colliding and creating an electron-positron pair? I'm not saying it isn't, I'm just curious why and how.

Huh, I never really thought about boson antiparticles, thanks for driving me to it. I did a little digging and I'm happy to report that what I wrote seems to be accurate, it isn't known whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles or not. The term Majorana particle only applies to fermions, which I didn't know. As for photon-photon annihilation, why do you think it can't happen? Annihilation is when 2 particles collide and produce a bunch of other particles, often photons, but not necessarily. Does that not happen to photons? For possible neutrino-neutrino annihilation, my quick uninformed search suggested that possible neutrinoless double beta decay may be interpreted as annihilation of neutrinos. The wiki particle says it would require change of the neutrino to a right-handed one, which seems like a requirement for annihilation anyway? I don't know, I really barely know anything about this stuff. But it seems that if neutrino is its own antiparticle, its annihilation with itself is not obviously out of the question. I had no idea we don't know where they take their mass. That's very, very interesting, thank you!

I live under the impression that we don't conclusively know, although some headway was made. There is a chance that neutrinos are their own antiparticles. I think the right term to start a search on the topic is Majorana particles. This theory was featured in Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, BTW.

I apologise, I don't have time for a more exhaustive explnation, I would have to study it again first. If you want, I can try to have a look at it later.

Why does it get so downvoted? Is it just because it's an unexpected idea? I think it could be an interesting discussion. Is Charon a moon? How about Ganymede and Moon? They are bigger than Mercury... Of course nothing will change, but the discussion might be interesting. And personally, I wouldn't mind living on one of the binary planets, if it was useful.

It was great, as always. My girlfried said she has to make an account for next year, so we can vote independently :-) Thank you so much for organising it! It was a lot of fun and surprising about of suspense.

I have just one suggestion. How about including latin names, at least in one place? It would make it easier to find correct local names. At the moment, I'm not really sure about the identities of some of the owls in my language, it would push me to learn them.

Surprisingly, I just read it actually does, and quite a few. None revolutionary and eye-catching like everybody hoped, but apparently, most of us has graphene in our smartphones, for example. I don't remember specifics, I can try to look for the article where I read it, if you want very much.

I think a quasi-particle is more like a phenomenon that can mathematically be described in a way a particle would be, rather than just a group of particles. After all, holes in semiconductors are quasiparticles caused by a lack of real particles.

Admittedly, I know very little about quasi-particles.

Personally, if I bookmark something, the odds of ever getting back to it are very, very low, and so are the odds of deleting obsolete bookmarks of unread news etc. But the songs tips are great, I'll have to look into it, thank you!

And 30 tabs is very tame.

That was awesome, thank you!

That makes sense. You can't read pipes either, right?

Are the fuel and oxidizer tanks necessary? Doesn't the thruster's internal buffer suffice?